Elke Vlemincx
Elke Vlemincx obtained her PhD in Psychology in 2010 at the University of Leuven, where she was a teaching assistant in the research group on Health Psychology, under supervision of Omer Van den Bergh. Her PhD thesis was entitled: ‘Sighing: A Psychophysiological Resetter Hypothesis’.
In 2010, she received a research grant of the Research Foundation – Flanders (FWO) for her research project ‘The effects of attention and emotion on dynamic breathing regulation’. During this first post doc, she spent a year at the Trauma, Stress and Anxiety Research Group at the University of Michigan, working with Jim Abelson on the relationship between sighs, HPA-axis reactivity and anxiety sensitivity.
In 2013, she received research grants of the Research Foundation – Flanders (FWO) and the Belgian National Fund for Scientific Research (FNRS) for the research projects ‘A search for the mechanisms underlying respiratory dysregulation in anxiety and alexithymia, respectively’.
She combined the FWO project with a long stay at the University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf in Germany, working with Christian Büchel on a research project on the neural underpinnings of nocebo and placebo effects in the respiratory system.
Currently, she is continuing the FNRS research project investigating the relationships between breathing regulation (focusing on sighing and respiratory variability) and emotion (dys)regulation at the University of Louvain, working with Olivier Luminet.